RECALL ELECTION BLOCKED

A federal appeals court blocked California's Oct. 7 recall election Monday, throwing the fate of the unprecedented election into question.

The Ninth U.S. Court or Appeals ruled that the vote cannot take place because almost half of the votes will be cast on unreliable problematic punch-card machines. The decision was granted an immediate 7-day stay to give the losing sides to appeal.

The three-judge panel said that the use of the problematic machines is exacerbated by the sheer number of candidates vying to succeed Governor Davis if he is recalled.

The ballot includes the recall issue as well as two propositions.

The challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union was the last of about a dozen legal attempts to delay the recall election.

The judges said it is unacceptable that six counties would be using outdated punch-card ballots, the type that sparked the "hanging chads'' litigation in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.

The appellate panel agreed with the ACLU that the voting machines were prone to error and that Davis' fate could be decided later. By that time, the counties have promised to replace their punch-card machines under a court order in separate litigation.

The counties include the state's most populous region, Los Angeles, in addition to Mendocino, Sacramento, San Diego, Santa Clara and Solano. They represented 44 percent of the state's registered voters during the 2000 election.

"In sum, in assessing the public interest, the balance falls heavily in favor of postponing the election for a few months,'' the court said. (full story)

This is huge.

If the ruling stands, the election will be pushed back at least a few months. If it is held simultaneously with the March 7 election, which includes the Democratic Presidential Primary, then that's it, Davis stays, end of story. But even if the election is to be held in December, January or February, I'd still call it good news for Gray and state Democrats. Everything there is to be said in favor of the recall has already been said, and support for it (and the position-free Arnold, for that matter) has nowhere to go but down.

Naturally, if the supporters of the recall file an appeal, which they definitely will, it goes up from the 9th Circuit to the 9 Supreme Court Justices.

But will the Supremes take it? Better yet, would national Republicans, particularly in the White House, want them to take it?

Back on August 7, I wrote this regarding the California Supreme Court's then-impending decision on the challenges to the recall (of course, the CSC decided not to block the recall):

...guess where this could go. Only it wont. The Nino have been doing their darnedest since Bush v. Gore to create an alternate legacy (just ask Justice Kennedy, who penned the sweeping ruling in the Texas sodomy case), so I doubt they'd intervene to help carry out what essentially amounts to another Republican coup. Also, the higher on the national stage this goes, the more it may remind the American people of all that Florida business, and that is not what the Bushies nor the national GOP wants (especially since the recall supporters want a rushed special election that may disenfranchise a lot of potential voters who would probably vote against the recall).

Applying this reasoning to the Ninth Circuit ruling, I'm guessing that SCOTUS has a ten-foot-pole policy on this one. The wild card, of course, is that conservatives have been trying to paint the Ninth Circuit judges as a group of commie wackos, especially since the Pledge of Allegiance ruling last year (which, by the way, still stands), so perhaps the Supremes could try to get away with awarding the pro-recall side without thinking they're being as anti-democratic as they really are. Personally, I doubt this, Florida just looms too large.

Here's a message for conservatives who support the recall: If you are really a true advocate of democracy, then you should have, on good faith, been pushing hard for modernization of voting materials for a long time now, to go with supporting the ouster of Davis and the election of Ahhnuld/McClintock/whomever. So what if the people you'd be re-enfranchising would likely vote against your aims? If you guys won, then you would have so much more legitimacy in the minds of California voters after having done that. The Democrats in the US Congress put themselves at a tactical disadvantage, in the name of the greater good, by consistently pushing for campaign finance reform. So, California conservatives, where's your good faith gesture?

That would never happen, as Republicans have shown their distaste for the democratic process in recent years, in ways ranging from obsession, to theft, to exploitation of law, to childish do-over-ism. With their attitude towards voters in California who may be disenfranchised by outdated punchcard ballots and other faulty voting machinery, they reveal yet another aspect of such a distaste: passive aggressiveness.

UPDATE: Atrios puts it in a much more concise fashion than I did:

And, no, I can't imagine the Supremos getting anywhere near this one. They don't want the feces of Bush v. Gore being shoved into their faces.

Indeed.